Sat Nav recommendations for nervous driver

[dontcallmehon]

Can any of you recommend a really simple, easy to understand Sat Nav for me? I've recently passed my test and will have to do a fair bit of local driving, including some motorway driving, which I find confusing and a bit scary. I have no sense of direction and am easily confused by gadgets.

I would like something for less than £150 if possible.

We have sat nav I find it incredibly useless i.e. it always takes us down some overgrown country lane not fit for a pedestrian, or if you decide to go a different way to that which it has planned, it goes "recalculating...recalculating...recalculating" in an annoying voice until you switch it off. It has got us lost spectacularly on more than one occasion.

Sorry if that's not very helpful...

I use a tomtom, they are not perfect buti wouldn't be without it. I have one with a larger screen, can't remember the exact model, but it give lane guidance for when you are coming of for joining the motorway.

You need to make sure it is set up ok. My Dad had his set to 'shortest distance' and not 'fastest route' so he kept being guided down single track lanes etc.

I still keep a map with me and I often cross check the route.

Thank you both. Hmm, will have a look at the TomTom. Just don't want something that will distract me from driving, but I do need something to avoid getting hopelessly lost all the time.

We have a Garmin Nuvi 1240. It is quite a basic Sat Nav, but it mostly works well and is reasonably simple to operate. The advantage of being basic is that there are not lots of advanced functions to work out and it's relatively cheap. The newer Nuvi 2240 is only a little more and offers lane assist, which may be helpful at complicated junctions.

It will give you spoken directions, so you don't have to look at the screen, but that annoys my wife, so we mostly leave that turned off.

I am often told that TomTom are better than Garmin, but nobody has ever been able to give me a convincing reason why. Ideally you should borrow a TomTom and a Garmin to compare and see which suits you, before spending any money.

I think that the general opinion is that TomTom route choice is slightly better especially the real time traffic, and also route recalculation is slightly quicker and better with Tomtom. However, Garmin support software and customer support is better than Tomtom.

Basically Tomtom has the edge if it's working well but if you need support then Garmin is better. Ie. there is not much in it!

I chose Tomtom as I liked the bigger screen of the model I had picked, liked the lane assist and liked the live traffic update. The software that you use on your PC for registering, updates etc is shockingly bad. The Tomtom can occasionally, loose it's signal which can be very frustrating. I don't know if Garmin has that problem so much.

This info is based on extensive nerdy research carried out about 6 months ago so it could be out of date. I used Which, online forums and they are always reliable etc etc

I agree with Leander. Garmin satnavs do tend to favour the country lane route far more than TomTom. We have a TomTom and I like it because it gives you plenty of warning when you need to turn off the road you are on. It also gives lane guidance in cities. I agree about losing the signal as well though. Bradford is an especially bad place for losing satnav signals.

We've not had problems with the Garmin losing it's signal, but a couple of times recently we've had issues with it taking a few minutes to acquire the signal in the first place. OTOH, we mainly use it on holidays, so it might show more issues in everyday use?

Another thing to consider might be the cost of updates. We haven't needed to update ours, but buying a one off update is £50 and lifetime updates could be as much as £100 from the Garmin store. OTOH last time I looked you could get lifetime updates for £55 from Amazon.

I have a Garmin Nuvi 205 (I think), it's really old and I only use it for geocaching as it can be programmed with co-ordinates.

For in the car navigation I use a TomTom One, as I don't have a car charger for the Garmin. :)